The US Navy is complacent, Austin Vernon suggests, after lacking a competitor for so long:
Modern carrier design reflects that. Thankfully physics has little to say about how much a carrier needs to cost. The new USS Ford weighs 100,000 tons. Steel costs ~$700/ton, so the basic materials are only $70 million. Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) are roughly the same size. They cost ~$90 million, barely more than steel and engines. Crew quarters for 5000 sailors, nuclear reactors, radars, catapults, flag accommodations, specialized systems, and general government bloat get you to a $10+ billion ship.
The minimum requirements for a carrier are:
- Launch full-size aircraft
- Have space for bombs, fuel, and crew
One option is to design carriers without complex systems. Make the deck long enough to launch aircraft without catapults or arresting wires. Use ramps instead of elevators. Put only the most basic radio or radar. Then use cost-effective marine diesel engines instead of high-performance power plants. Don’t bother with fuel piping. Small trucks can carry fuel from deep in the ship to the hangar. Having ramps at each end of the runway simplifies traffic control. You don’t even need a tower, just a pure flat deck. Forget flag facilities. The admirals can stay on an AEGIS ship if they want fancy screens and wardrooms.
The carrier would be the longest ship in the world at ~1000 meters. The vessel before outfitting would cost ~$300 million if built like VLCCs. Modular construction methods help shipyards complete these ships in less than a year. Crew quarters can be austere to speed construction. Sleeping arrangements would be small cots, there wouldn’t be kitchens (eat MREs) or plumbing (use chemical toilets, bottled water, and camp showers topside), and all laundry could be shipped offsite. A typical VLCC only has twenty crew, so most sailors will be the ~1400 it takes to run seven squadrons of aircraft. Active combat will require a few hundred more solely for firefighting and damage repair. Cutting support functions and features reduces the crew significantly.
The ship will be ~3x the size with half the crew, leaving excess space. That allows aircraft to be kept below deck and protected. Crew quarters can move deep into the interior. The ship can fill the cavities surrounding crew and aircraft storage with closed-cell aluminum foam. These foams are fire-proof, absorb energy, and are impermeable to water to prevent flooding.
The design could end up near ~$1 billion with rapid development and construction times once the Navy commissions a suitable dry dock.
Assume both sides have omniscient satellite coverage and very capable AI/ML:
The first goal is to degrade missile seeker performance. Missiles can use radar, infrared, visual, and electronic listening sensors for terminal guidance. A small escort ship could have a powerful jamming suite to spoof the satellite’s synthetic aperture radar, jam radar frequencies the missiles use, and degrade satellite-to-missile communication. It is best for it to be separate from the carrier to thwart home-on-jam seekers. Smoke can obscure visual observation, and many aerosols can degrade the infrared spectrum. For good measure, you can spread diesel on the ocean and light it on fire. Chaff can distort any unjammed radar signals. None of these methods are perfect, but they all degrade missile performance. The cost is marginal compared to the billions of dollars a missile salvo would cost. Satellites will monitor China’s mainland for launch plumes, giving the carrier group ~15-30 minutes of warning. The carrier crew can launch its planes, drain and park fuel trucks, secure tools in lockers, store munitions, and go to shelters during the missile flight time.
Missiles won’t be the only users of AI/ML. Instead of bespoke close-in weapon systems that cost $10 million, you can hook up cheap infrared cameras and iPhone-level computing to 20 mm and 40 mm cannons. You are looking at $100,000 per gun instead. An ideal situation might be spending $100 million to buy 1000 cannons and putting them on a few glorified barges near carriers (but outside of the smoke/aerosols). These guns have a several thousand meter range, providing several long seconds to wreck incoming missiles. And because we have advanced AI/ML, aiming will be very accurate.
When we do the math, fifty $20 million missiles equals a $1 billion carrier. ~100,000 bullets from our guns equal one missile. We can afford to turn the sky black with lead. Our defenses can get off around 50,000 per second. Most CIWSs don’t even bother using explosive shells, but that is an option to make the ammo more effective.
Assume China drains its entire inventory of ~200 DF-21D and DF-26 missiles in one salvo. The SM-6 and SM-3s from the guided missile ships will get a few – call it 10%. Our guns will get off 150,000 rounds – almost 1000 rounds per missile – even if the Chinese time the attack perfectly. Any staggering of the missiles increases the rounds per missile dramatically. Of course, some will still probably get through. A portion will be confused by the smoke/aerosol/chaff/fire/jamming countermeasures. Assume a few hit the flight deck of our carriers. They’ll punch some holes and get buried in aluminum foam. Maybe they push some damage into the empty hangar.
Thousands of sailors will scurry to put out any localized fires. Then they’ll drive some forklifts out of shelters to pick up steel plates, beams, and extra bails of aluminum foam to take up the ramps. They’ll cut up damaged deck plate pieces, toss in the foam bails, insert beams, and use hundreds of welders to attach new plates. The crew will repair the damage before the planes need to divert away.
These defenses also work well for drone swarms. Iranian Shaheds would struggle to sneak by the 1000 guns with independent eyes, and their 80-pound warheads would barely dent the paint. The ramps could have blast doors to keep any drones from wandering down toward the planes.
The strike group can carry on and do its job.
You can’t have a manned warship without kitchen or plumbing. It isn’t possible and don’t bother. Off-site laundry is negotiable.
I indorse assumptions of near-omniscient satellite coverage and -omnipresent AI, and the prospect of blotting out the sun with mortars and lead.
The proper vehicle, however, is not the aircraft carrier, but the battleship.
This “low cost carrier” concept is just silly.
“The design could end up near ~$1 billion with rapid development and construction times once the Navy commissions a suitable dry dock.”
How much would a dry dock more than half a mile long cost? Just as importantly, how long would it take to get the permits to build the dock, and to fight off all the lawsuits? Would the dry dock gates & pumps have to be bought from China — because the increasingly de-industrialized US probably no longer has that physical capability?
And once operational and after crossing half the world to take war to China’s shores — (Why? China is not threatening US shores) — the vessel would be a giant slow-maneuvering target for stealthy Chinese submarines.
Perhaps it would be wiser to Give Peace A Chance instead of treating everyone else in the world as an enemy.
This author seems to think that sailors are cheaper than ship systems, which isn’t the case today and definitely won’t be the case when you look at the re-enlistment bonuses you’d need once you tell them they’ll be eating MREs and shitting in chemical toilets for their whole tour. This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.
Any war with a nuclear power touching their ‘shores’ is nuclear war.
The rest is fantasy.
Imagine that they could build them cheaply: that would greatly reduce opportunities for porkbarreling and graft, so it’s terribly counterproductive.
There is a special term for an aircraft carrier with no complex systems. It is called “sunk.”